Customer service from a faulty airport purchase.

by Brankica
(Serbia)

I was traveling through an Airport and saw a nice net book that had a great price compared to others. I believe it was a promo sale or something.

Me and my husband bought two of them and I asked them if it can be replaced in case something is wrong with it, since I know how tricky electronics can be.

We bought them while traveling to Europe to spend our vacation.

Once I reached the hotel, I charged the net book straight away and once the battery was full, I turned it on. It crashed after less than 5 minutes.

I restarted it and it took about 10 minutes for it to crash again.

It had strange noise inside so I guessed it was a hardware and not a software problem.

We were on vacation for about two weeks and I tried to work on it several times. Each time it took longer but still crashed.

You open the internet - it crashes. You open a simple program like NotePad and it crashes again.
So I was planning to change it once we reach the same airport on our way back to Africa.

I went to the shop where I bought it and they sent me to Customer Service point.

I explained the problem and asked for the net book to be replaced with a working one.

They said it is not possible to do that!

Since we had to spend 8 hours at the airport they said they will try to see what is wrong with it and we should come back in an hour.

When we came back the person at the counter said there is nothing wrong with it as he has turned it on and kept it on for an hour!

I tried to explain that I needed the net book to work.

I asked about his training as a computer technician and he replied he is NOT a technician and that they don't actually have one at the airport duty free shop!

So I asked him if he was qualified to say nothing was wrong with it if he wan't trained in computers and he said "Well it seems OK"!

Wow!

He then told me that if I wasn't satisfied with it I should have thought more before I bought it. And I was not even asking for my money back!!!

I was determined to explain that I do want to keep the net book I just wanted a working one. I actually loved it as I played with the net book my husband bought, it was working properly.

Then they offered to send it back to the factory to be fixed and I could pick it up next time I travel through the airport.

Now, let me ask you something. Do you think there are many people that travel back and forth in this economic situation? This was our vacation from Africa where we worked, we were going home to see the family and this stopover was the only solution as flying from Africa is really expensive.

I told him I will not be traveling there any more and I want my problem to be solved because two weeks ago I asked if it will be replaced in case there are problems and I was told YES.

I battled with him for an hour until I asked to see the manager.

After talking to the manager for 5 minutes he replied only with "I don't think we have the same color so would you agree to a different color of the net book?"

So I finally got it replaced. I charged it at the airport and tried it for several hours just to be sure I didn't get a faulty one again.

I did solve my problem but I definitely think of this as a bad customer service because we bought two net books and two mobile phones (not cheap ones) and out of those 4 things two were not working properly, one net book and one 550$ phone.

They have never offered for example to fix it and ship it to where ever I was going, so unless you were flying through Dubai again you basically could not count on getting it back!

I believe the only reason I finally fixed the problem was because I was becoming hostile, sometimes you have to get aggressive to get the outcome you require.